Interview: Author Misa Sugiura discusses the gray area of true love

After an embarrassing incident with her crush at the end-of-year party, Nozomi decides to use her summer with her family in San Francisco to make a fresh start for herself and her love life in Misa Sugiura’s Love & Other Natural Disasters.

What she doesn’t intend is for her love life to spiral out of control with a fake dating scheme. But when Nozomi meets Willow, who seems like the perfect dream girl, she’s willing to do whatever it takes to be with her, even if it isn’t real.

Of course, fantasy and reality soon collide as Willow’s ex and new girlfriend collide with Nozomi’s plans to woo Willow for real, all while Nozomi deals with her parents’ recent divorce and her homophobic grandmother’s declining health.

Culturess sat down with Sugiura to discuss the complexities of love, story tropes and archetypes, and what readers might take away from the story about the meaning of “true love.” (Read our full review of Love & Other Natural Disasters before diving into the interview below.)

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Culturess:  Love & Other Natural Disasters concludes with an author’s note discussing the limitations, complexities, and sometimes compromises that come with love. Without spoiling the novel, can you discuss why you included this with the text?

Misa Sugiura:  Nozomi, the main character, is determined not to let her family’s mistakes and weaknesses get in the way of her vision of what true love can and should be. Of course, she learns that life and love aren’t always that simple, and she has to make a few compromises in the end.

However, readers often think that a character’s final choices reflect the author’s personal opinion, or even the capital-T-Truth,so I wanted to it clear that the decisions she makes are her own—not my general recommendation to everyone—and that the way I ended the book is only one of many possible outcomes.

Culturess:  Love & Other Natural Disasters handles many different plot points:  divorce, death, coming out, romantic relationships, and more. How did you balance each subplot without going too far or too little into one of them?

Sugiura:  The short answer is that I had an incredibly wise and talented editor, Stephanie Stein. The longer, process-related answer is that once I’d finished my second draft, I wrote one-sentence plot summaries for each chapter on index cards, and then color-coded them according to their themes/subplots.

Then I laid them out to see if there were spots with too much green, for example, or if there was a long stretch without yellow. As long as it didn’t mess with the timeline too much, it was easy to see where I needed to move chapters, cut back, or add to a plotline.

Culturess:  Nozomi begins the novel very much believing that love conquers all and goes on a journey with that belief. What made you want to explore this core concept in a young adult novel? Why do you think it’s important for young readers to interrogate this idea?

Sugiura:  When I decided to write a rom-com, I knew I wanted to dig into some of the core tenets of the genre, and one of those is the idea that love conquers all.

Questioning the idea of love as all-powerful seemed like a good fit for YA since, for many of us, the teen years are really the first time when our lives get emotionally complicated: we see just how fallible our parents are, we begin to think about how selfish and duplicitous our peers can be, and many of us experience our first heartbreak.

I hope that teen readers will expand their definition of love, and begin to have empathy for those whose decisions may seem unloving, and I hope that teens who are experiencing the fact that love is not always the answer will find solace in Nozomi’s resilience in the face of this hard truth.

Culturess:  Nozomi also tends to have very archetypal pre-conceived notions of people. For example, she believes Willow is her dream girl, Arden is the antagonist, and that Dela is her polar opposite.

Archetypes are a staple of romantic comedies, but you seemed to play with that notion here. What themes or ideas were you wanting to communicate to the reader?

Sugiura:  The tropes, archetypes, and even stereotypes in genres like rom-coms and superhero stories have endured for a reason: people love them (myself included). I think we see ourselves and others in those tropes, however broad they may be; and we all have a tendency to categorize others.

There’s nothing wrong with that per se, but it’s also good to take a step back and examine our first impressions and our beliefs about ourselves and others. I hope that by playing around with these beloved archetypes, I was able to allow readers to do that in a way that’s fun and not too didactic.

Culturess:  Nozomi’s Baba is a key figure in the background of Nozomi’s life, both as her family struggles to take care of her and as Nozomi struggles to determine her relationship with her. Why did you include this in the novel and what do you want readers to take away from this part of the story?

Sugiura:  Over the past few years, a number of my friends have struggled with family members whose views on social issues are extremely upsetting, and they have had to make tough decisions about how much to include those family members in their lives; it was a sometimes a case where love didn’t conquer all.

I’d been wanting to address it in a novel for quite a while, and Love & Other Natural Disasters seemed like the right one. I’d also been wanting to write about the pain of losing a relationship with a grandparent to dementia, which is something I’ve experienced, and I liked the way the second issue complicated the first.

I hope that readers will appreciate how much gray area there is in “true love,” which is something we often define in absolutes.

Love & Other Natural Disasters is available now wherever books are sold. Let us know if you add it to your TBR pile.